Frame Rate Up-Conversion Method for Video Processing Applications

In this paper, a new low-complexity frame rate up-conversion (FRUC) method is proposed for video processing applications. In the proposed FRUC method, true motion estimation (TME) is used to track motion trajectories by imposing smoothness constraints on block-matching algorithm (BMA). In order to produce high-quality interpolated frames, TME is performed in both forward and backward directions; then, the reliable dense motion vector field is obtained by using the multistage motion vector (MV) post-processing method. The constraints of low computational complexity and low memory bandwidth are also considered in our method. We use a histogram-based predictive search to impose smoothness constrains and reduce the number of search points. Furthermore, a complexity-simplified improvement of the proposed method is introduced to reduce computational complexity with slight quality degradation. In addition, a new scan order of BMA and a pipelining of MV post-processing are presented to guarantee the causality of the system and improve the pixel data reuse, which reduces the memory bandwidth. The experiment results show that the proposed FRUC method achieves not only better video quality, but also low computational complexity and memory bandwidth compared to the conventional methods.